Swarms of Killer Females at the Border--and They Hate Jeans

The audience members gasped. Their mouths dropped open in shock and amazement. They laughed nervously.

Then they scarfed more fruit salad and taquitos.

No, they weren’t watching slasher movies or dissecting puppies over lunch Wednesday at Northridge Hospital Medical Center.

About three dozen nurses, paramedics and firefighters had trooped into an auditorium for a lecture about killer bees.

The speaker was C. R. (Charlie) Duncan, the grizzled, folksy president of the Los Angeles County Beekeepers Assn. He explained to the emergency workers how to avoid getting stung to pieces by the bees, as some friends of his almost were on a bee-hunting trip to Brazil.

The relentless northward march of killer bees--which have killed hundreds of people and thousands of animals in South and Central America--has inspired fearsome headlines, public anxiety and a substantial amount of skeptical mirth for years.

Four years ago, the bees reached Texas. Last year, they spread to Arizona.

But for reasons not completely understood, the bees have stalled at the Arizona-California border. Some experts speculate that a dry spring deprived them of food, water and shelter needed to safely cross the desert.

Others say the bees, whose ancestors evolved in tropical Africa, have reached the end of their genetic tether, and cannot thrive in colder climes.

Since swarming into Texas in 1990, the bees have killed only one person, an elderly man who suffered a heart attack after trying to clean out a colony with a torch. Another Texas man was stung 1,000 times but survived.

Killer bees have been on the loose and multiplying since 1956, when 26 queen bees escaped from a Brazilian entomologist’s laboratory. The scientist, Warwick Kerr, had imported the queens from South Africa in an effort to breed better honey-producing insects.

The fugitives’ offspring have since colonized two continents, 20 countries and more than 6 million square acres. There are millions in Texas, and perhaps a trillion south of the border.

The Africanized bees are cousins to the more docile European honeybee, widely used to pollinate American crops. While only a handful of European bees will attack a predator, Africanized bees sting en masse--hundreds and even thousands at a time.

Possibly the nastiest attack on record occurred in 1986, when a University of Miami graduate student on a field trip in Costa Rica stepped in a crack outside a cave, disturbing a killer bee colony. His foot wedged in the crack, the student was stung almost 8,000 times and died from the attack.

“This,” said Duncan, “is one bad bee.”

As his listeners sat enthralled, Duncan related his own brush with killer bees in Brazil.

He had been part of a group of about 40 beekeepers who wanted to study the Africanized bee up close and personal. The night before they entered the jungle, some of the party bragged that they weren’t afraid of the killers, and wouldn’t wear protective veils or gloves.

The next day, Duncan and a pal spotted three bee colonies in a tree and headed toward them. When they were about half a city block away, Duncan pulled out his camera but dropped it.

By the time he picked it up, he said, the angry bees had already zeroed in on the two men. Duncan’s camera was covered with so many bees he couldn’t hold on to it.

The men had so many bees on their veils they had to use their hands as windshield wipers, constantly sweeping the bees away in order to see.

“The man who said, ‘I will not wear a veil,’ I carried over to the truck with his head underneath my arms, trying to cover up his face,” Duncan said. “He’d been stung many more times than a man should be in the face.”

“The man who wouldn’t wear gloves, we couldn’t get the gloves on his hands because they were full of bees. And that night, sitting around the campfire, we had a totally different group of people. Some of them said, ‘I’ll sell the damned operation, I’ll sell everything I’ve got. I’ll not put up with this.’ ”

After thus terrifying his audience, Duncan related a few tips on how to avoid attacks.

For one thing, never wear new blue jeans on a picnic.

Huh?

Denim jeans contain a dye, he explained, that incites bees. Washing jeans a few times makes them safe to wear.

Dark clothing and sunglasses also are no-nos.

“Bees hate the color black,” he said.

In fact, killer bees can be as snippy about your accouterments as a Paris fashion critic. They also hate leather (reminds them of cows and horses, which they don’t like) and strong perfume.

And remember: Bees fly at 15 m.p.h., so don’t try to outrun them. Walk away from them, covering your head and face with a jacket.

*

Killer-bee stingers, said Duncan, can penetrate almost any clothing, including leather.

If you get stung, don’t pull the stinger straight out. That only causes it to pump more poison into your body from an insidiously designed sac. Use a fingernail or credit card to scrape the stinger out.

Duncan said all this aggressiveness comes from female worker bees, not male drones, which are so lazy and helpless they can’t sting and must be fed by the females.

“Sounds like a typical male,” quipped a nurse in the audience.

Duncan said the male’s main function is to mate with a queen. This he does in midair, at altitudes of 300 to 400 feet.

Once a male has mated, however, he literally explodes, and falls back to Earth, dead.

“But he has a smile that runs from ear to ear,” said Duncan, to gales of laughter from his listeners.